Maybe I should take the Empire Builder and/or the California Zephyr while there's still time. To be sure, there are a lot of subsidies built into a lot of transportation options and, if you eliminate Amtrak outside of the Northeast, a lot of those passengers need to get from A to B somehow (which may well be sub-segments of the long haul routes).

But, yeah, from a utilitarian perspective I've never found inter-city Amtrak travel to make a lot of sense in the US outside of the Northeast (nor, in many cases, Europe for that matter).